Lunatics by Dave Barry

Philip Horkman is a happy man, the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for a local kids’ soccer league. Jeffrey Peckerman is the proud and loving father of a star athlete in the girls’ ten-and-under soccer league, and he’s not exactly happy with the ref.

The two of them are about to collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, subversives, bears, revolutionaries, pirates, and a black ops team that does not exist. Where all that takes them you can’t even begin to guess, but the literary journey there is a masterpiece of inspiration, chaos, and unadulterated, well, lunacy. And they might even learn a lesson or two along the way.

DAVE BARRY's recent bestselling books include his Peter Pan prequels, written with Ridley Pearson; Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far); and I'll Mature When I'm Dead. He lives in Coral Gables, Florida.ALAN ZWEIBEL is an original Saturday Night Live writer, the winner of multiple Emmy Awards for his television work, the Thurber Prize for his novel The Other Shulman, and collaborator with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award–winning play 700 Sundays. He lives in Short Hills, New Jersey.

Unrated Critic Reviews for Lunatics

Kirkus Reviews

From here events get even goofier, as the two opponents land in Cuba (and co-lead a revolution), then go to Mozambique (and are captured by pirates), thence to Yemen (where they are rescued by the Mossad), afterwards to Beijing (and lead a protest in Tiananmen Square), and finally to California, ...

New York Journal of Books

“After his ‘retirement’ from the newspaper in 2005, Mr. Barry set out to write books. In Lunatics he has partnered with the well-known television writer Alan Zweibel. The result is a book that borders on strange: full of complex and improbable plot twists.”

AV Club

Dave Barry’s first novel for adults, Big Trouble, had everything necessary to prompt a big-screen adaptation: young love, hitmen, unwitting and bumbling fighting families, the threat of nuclear war, and a mid-flight airplane explosion for a climax.

Chicago Sun Times

In his popular books and newspaper columns, Dave Barry displays such a zany wit that on the rare occasions he’s being serious he actually has to specify, “I am not making this up.”
Paragraph after paragraph, his columns are laugh-out-loud funny.

The Agony Column

While Barry's Peckerman is of necessity less nuanced (a relative term when applied to a broad farce such as this) than Zweibel's Horkman, Barry does get to unleash the gross jokes and entertaining curses.